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Software Devs Leaving Greece For Good, Finance Minister Resigns
New submitter TheHawke writes with this story from ZDNet about the exodus of software developers from Greece. "In the last three years, almost 80 percent of my friends, mostly developers, left Greece," software developer Panagiotis Kefalidis told ZDNet. "When I left for North America, my mother was not happy, but... it is what it is." It's not just the software developers quitting either. The Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis also resigned. A portion of his resignation announcement reads: "Soon after the announcement of the referendum results, I was made aware of a certain preference by some Eurogroup participants, and assorted ‘partners’, for my ‘absence’ from its meetings; an idea that the Prime Minister judged to be potentially helpful to him in reaching an agreement. For this reason I am leaving the Ministry of Finance today."
Umm, I lived in Vancouver Canada for 10 years as a software developer and me and most of my software developer friends ALSO moved to the US (I currently work for Apple, most work for Google or other local companies). Greek developers may have an extra incentive to move, but they are hardly unique.
A developer working in Greece will pay taxes in Greece and spend most of his/her income in Greece.
A developer leaving Greece will not pay income tax in Greece and IF he/she sends back any money it is nothing compared to what he/she would earn in Greece. Furthermore Greece paid the developers education in the expectation it would be a wise investment in the future (education == long term investment).
Note, in case this developer is doing work for a foreign company, this adds to Greece export and the differences are even larger.
Sorry, the helping out relatives story is not in the interest of Greece.
I think it's pretty clear Varoufakis was turfed by Tsipras because the only hope in hell Greece now has of negotiating a deal with the Troika and remaining in the Eurozone and even in the EU is not having that man by his side. The price of even talking about a new deal and further bailouts is Varoufakis's head, which has been delivered to Merkel on a silver platter. This referendum was completely about Tsipras's political survival, and having achieved that, Greek voters will now witness just how utterly irrelevant the referendum was.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"A developer working in Greece will pay taxes in Greece"
No he won't. That's why they're in this mess.
"Adios, suckers!" the Finance Minister screamed as he hit his secret eject button.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
That would be redundant as they just voted to screw themselves far worse than you ever could. If
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
From what I can tell, nobody knows WTF it means.
The Greek government thinks that the will of the people now means they have more leverage to negotiate.
The problem is they're asking for handouts and free money from other governments who have to explain to their citizens Greek pensions are being funded by everybody else.
Greece is essentially bankrupt, and wants more money. So either every other EU government is going to throw even more taxpayer money into the pit which is Greece's economy, or they're going to tell Greece to piss up a rope.
This sounds like someone having their house foreclosed demanding the banks forgive their debt, lower their interest rate, and give them more money to pay bills.
In other words, it sounds like the Greek government is living in a fantasy where everybody else pays for their society.
And I'm not sure that's gonna happen.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Seriously! Have you made any attempt to understand this problem?
Former Greek governments borrowed the money, not bankers. Most of the money wasn't lent by bankers. The troika comprises the EU, the IMF and the European Central Bank - mostly politicians, not bankers.
The current problem facing Greece is that no-one will lend them any more money. Even if 100% of their past debts were written off, current tax receipts are insufficient to meet current expenditure. Without more money from the people you mistakenly call bankers, austerity in Greece will become much worse.
Put the blame where it really lies. Not with bankers, but with dishonest politicians and a delusional electorate who always believed someone else would pay their bills.
Yes Socialism...
The banks are not the cause of the problem here, but the symptom of the sickness that's killing Greece (and countries in similar situations). Greek banks WILL fail. They don't have stacks of euros to stuff into the ATM's and the people of Greece are desperately trying to empty their accounts because everybody knows that if you leave your cash in the bank, you won't get it out. Everybody wants to be in hard currency, euros. The banks have run out.
Ask yourself, how did Greece get to this point? Basically it's because they failed to make the most recent payment on their national debt. There isn't enough euros in the government coffers to make the payment, they defaulted and now they cannot borrow because nobody wants to lend them anything. Why is the government in Greece at this point? Because they SPENT money they didn't have and cannot raise. Normally countries just print more currency to pay loans, but you cannot do that when it's euros you need to print.
So what did Greece spend all this money on? Early retirement for everybody and social programs. Socialism in leaning, if not actual practice is what has Greece into crushing debt.
Greece is being crushed between the Eurozone and their debt, the debt that funded their social programs. The sad part though is that the people who will really pay for this are the poor, the people who didn't have the ability to move their assets OUT of Greece.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Not all of them returned, heck not even most of them returned. But risk-tolerance, ambition etc are not distributed uniformly, it follows the power law. So the 20% who returned took with them 80% of the risk-tolerance, ambition, entrepreneurship with them back to India.
So let Greece give up euro for drachma, let drachma fall as low as INR. It will thrive on tourism, and the Greeks coming back to start companies a few years down the road.
Germany has benefitted a lot by the economic union. Had Deutschmark stayed out of euro, its exports would have become so expensive no one could import them. 80% of Germany's exports are to rest of Europe. Capital would have naturally flowed to less expensive countries, and they would have the companies and employment restoring the balance. Greece leaving euro is going to be a bigger blow to Germany than to Greece.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The poor really don't have assets. The people who will really pay is the people who aren't rich but not poor either. Those who have money they put away for their later years and other needs will lose it. I feel sorry for them but there is little hope and it's going to get worse. The US will be in the same place in a decade or so. I have a retirement I'll probably never see.
Even if 100% of their past debts were written off, current tax receipts are insufficient to meet current expenditure.
That situation is exactly the same in the US (except the gap is about $500 billion right now, more than the entire Greek debt). The only reason that the US keeps going is that they control the lender (the Federal Reserve). At least they think they do.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Sorry, but you are incorrect. Greece reported a nearly 2 billion euro surplus in 2014, without taking interest payments into account. http://www.wsj.com/articles/greece-misses-target-on-budget-surplus-1421244654
If their debt were wiped out today they would keep that money and need no further bailouts. Better yet they could go back to the Drachma and manage their currency with a combination of monetary and fiscal policy, just like every other sovereign nation in the developed world.
You can't oversimplify the Greek situation as "socialism". There are plenty of examples of countries that are doing fine economically with policies that embrace social spending. The Greek situation is far more complex and involves politics and the Euro as much as anything else.
Sorry, but you're out of date. The Greek government's primary surplus disappeared shortly after the election of the Syriza government.
The Greek financial disaster came from refusal to live within their means and not run chronic deficits for decades on end. This is the end result of modern "borrow and spend" liberalism taken so far as to ruin the finances of Greece and exhaust the patience of the rest of Europe. The people bailing are the "children" spoken of when conservatives are heard to say we must not saddle our children with debt.
The thing that is not said is that the reason we must not do this is not merely because it is morally reprehensible, which it is, but that the children simply won't pay it. Unless you are ready to erect gulags to enslave people you can't make them live their lives to fund your unlimited socialist dreams.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Women wanting to be housewives aren't the problem. The problem is a socieconomic setup that makes it difficult to support a family on one income unless you're relatively well qualified or otherwise independently wealthy. Very few of the acceptable latter day social philosophies have a reproductive strategy outside of mass private or public childcare facilities, which most responsible parents quite rightly find repugnant.
The Federal Reserve doesn't work like that. The USA can maintain its government deficit because enough people are willing to buy US government bonds. If, one day, people no longer trust it to repay its debts, there will be a financial meltdown the like of which the world has never yet seen.
The largest purchaser of US bonds today is ... wait for it ... the Federal Reserve.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Meanwhile: I have to pay for my own hospital plan because in case I get sick I have to notify the public insurance carrier 15 days in advance of emergency surgery (no kidding!) or 3-4 months before booking an appointment with a doctor. I have to get an additional, expensive pension plan on top of the 350 Euros per month I am currently paying as mandatory social security because there will be no money when I'm 67 years old or have worked 40+ years to get the minimum pension of 700 Euros (nominal; actual payment after taxes and mandatory social security is around 480 Euros). I also need to set aside money to get the kids I'm planning on having to a private school because there are no teachers (not even substitutes) half of the time in the public schools.
If you are wondering why people tax evade you have to first ask the questions: 1. how much does the state take in taxes and 2. what does the state offer for the money it takes from its citizens? If the answers are "most of your money" and "not that much at all" respectively it doesn't take a genius to see why you get an endemic tax evasion for free.
Anyway. After three years of battling the system I gave up and moved away. My last tax filing in Greece was 2014 for my income in 2013. I am owed a 13,000 Euro tax return since August 10th, 2014. Of course it's NOT credited. And we're talking about money I have paid as a tax downpayment to the state since August 2013. They hold my money hostage for 2 years and they won't give it to me. Also, don't make the mistake of asking whether there's an interest rate for those two years. Don't be silly. There's not! Adding insult to injury I'm still a Greek tax citizen which means I get to pay taxes for the dividends I'm paid from my company abroad. Don't be ridiculous, of course they are NOT offset by the money the Greek state owes me! I have so far paid another 40+ thousand Euro taxes in these two years where the Greek state owes me the 13,000 Euro tax return.
I understand all this sounds alien to you. Why so much taxation, why no services in return, why the state isn't punctual in paying back. Beats me, brothers and sisters. I have concluded that one must be outright insane to try and do business if they're born in Greece.
If you do it by creating money out of thin air - yes, it shouldn't count as much. And that's what Germany and France were essentially doing all along.
And yes, I do have actual data to prove it: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/s...
If you check the numbers in details, it turns out that almost half of the German economic growth during the 2002-2008 period is solely because of this debt export to the periphery.
You donâ(TM)t actually know what you are talking about do you.
Most of the loans in question here were in fact loaned by German and French bankers to the Greeks prior to the 2008, Deutsche bank was one of the biggest. They could get somewhat higher returns loaning to Greece and they had some security because Greece was in the Eurozone. That security unravelled with the 2008 crash.
The ECB, EU, IMF gave massive loans to Greece in 2010, and most of it immediately went to extricate the German and French banks from their bad greek loans. If the Greeks has defaulted on the original loans then there would have been a massive banking crisis in Germany and France. The 2010 EU bailout was to save their banks more than it was to help the Greeks.
The Greeks just got more debt piled on top of too much debt and its totally destroyed their economy. Recently released IMF studies confirm the Greeks canâ(TM)t sustain their current debt load and it has to be restructed or they have to default. If they stay the current course with austerity and more and more bailout loans they are doomed.
If the Greeks had been smart they would have exited the EU and defaulted on the debt in 2009 and the people who made the bad loans, the German and French bankers, would have paid the price. Instead they got off scot free.
Iceland immediately defaulted in a similar situation, they had some short term pain but they rebounded, while the Greece has gotten nothing but worse and worse under the yoke of a corrupt European and global banking system.
For banking and loans to work there is a simple rule, if you are foolish enough to make a bad loan to someone who probably wonâ(TM)t pay it back, then you pay the price when they default. Instead the people who make the bad loans (i.e. bankers) get to keep their bonuses profits and everyone else gets to pay for their stupidity, greed and corruption.
@de_machina
That's usually what happens when you fire everyone, liquidate what's left and then proceed to have no further source of income: A large inflow of cash, followed by nothing.
Yeah, look at how awful countries like Norway and Sweden are with all their "nanny-state policies".... they only have the highest standards of living in the world.
Most of the money wasn't lent by bankers.
Yes, it actually was. The EU/IMF/ECB then bailed those banks out, for some inexplicable reason, by taking the debt off their hands. Neither group, bankers or EU, did risk analysis. If they did, Greece never would have been lent the money in the first place.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
When 51% are on the tit, democracy is over and done. Stick a fork in it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Norway has massive natural resource exports accounting for nearly 33% of GPD, imports half of what it exports and only 3 million people in the labor force. Sweden's GPD is also nearly 33% exports, slight trade imbalance in favor of exports and 5 million people in the labor force.
Greece has 12% GPD from exports, imports twice as much as it exports and has only 5 million in the workforce.
For perspective, the USA makes only 9% of GPD from exports (that includes the recent massive increase in gas and oil exports), imports 50% more than it exports and has 156 million people in the workforce.
Norway and Sweden's success has nothing to do with political models and entirely to do with geography. If the Aegean had oil fields, Greece would be a socialist paradise too.
You're quite right that the first two bailouts primarily rescued Greece's creditors, but Greece already owed that money to someone. The losers in those transactions weren't the Greeks - the big losers European taxpayers who adopted the Greek government's debts.
But you're very mistaken if you think that the biggest buyers of government debt are the banks. Pension funds, investment funds and insurance companies have far more cash to splash.
You're also pretty ignorant if you claim that institutions perform no credit assessment of their investments. For traded bonds like government IOUs, that assessment is essentially outsourced to three credit reference agencies, Moody's, Standard and Poor's and Fitch. Those agencies are supposedly licenced and regulated but utterly failed to identify the risk with Greek debt ahead of the downturn. If you're looking for a scapegoat on the creditor side, they're a much better scapegoat than the banks.
Blaming the banks is a lazy knee-jerk reaction that's not really grounded in fact. P.S. I'm not a banker.
Comedies generally sell better.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
A few additional interesting facts:
1) The original cause of the Greek debt was due to the fact that greek labor costs were significantly higher than other EU nations. When they joined the EU, this caused a large trade deficit...leading to lower GDP and higher debt.
2) Greece has always been somewhat left-leaning and rather than curtail spending during low income years, they actually increased spending by incurring more debt
3) The government (with the help of some banks) "hid" their massive deficit spending through the use of credit default swaps. This made Greece appear to be a better investment than they actually were when other banks provided loans.
4) Greece also historically has one of the highest rates of tax evasion
All of the above contributed to the present crisis, not just "bad greek loans".
Citations mostly from wikipedia, but plenty of similar info on the web.
I could take a cash advance on a credit card at 28%, put it in a deposit account at 1%, and generate a surplus without taking interest payments into account.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Norway and Sweden's success has nothing to do with political models and entirely to do with geography. If the Aegean had oil fields, Greece would be a socialist paradise too.
Not even close. Sweden doesn't have one drop of oil, we have industry. And adding to that, the social programmes of Sweden are more expansive than our Norwegian brethren, who have oil. You see the Norwegians fund almost all their oil income into the world's largest and most well managed oil fund that is set up to last "indefinitely". They're most certainly not burning it. (The money. The majority of the oil most certainly burns).
Also, the oil is a recent thing, barely thirty years old. (I am old enough to remember when Norway was "poor" and we used to go shopping for cheaper staples there), and guess what, Sweden's social programmes were even further ahead than the rest of Europe in particular, and the world in general.
Stefan Axelsson